In 2000, at a birthday party at the now closed Martini Grill in Albuquerque, my friend Rob and my then-girlfriend (now wife) Julie got to talking about our favorite books from childhood. Roald Dahl, The Dark is Rising, Lloyd Alexander, Narnia — having just completed a creative project, I was ready to move on to something else, and our discussion left me inspired to try my hand at young adult fiction.
The early drafts of what would become The Demon Queen and The Locksmith had a 5th grader stumbling into an alternate reality in an entirely predictable fantasy adventure. In 2002, during Draft 6, I set the work aside in frustration and wrote One Fall instead.
Years later, I took up Demon Queen again, starting at a blank page 1 with the sentence: Kevin was walking through the courtyard, minding his own business, heading to fourth period, just like everyone else, and Ruben threw a rock at him.
In the final version, that sentence appears on page 68, but it remains the sentence that kicked off the version of the story that worked. Kevin Brown, the surly 5th grader, had become Kevin Brown, the thoughtful freshman having a miserable first day of high school.
During the early days of writing the new version, my wife scored the complete Spectre Man DVD set for me in an eBay auction. The nostalgia trip of re-watching the premium episodes of that Japanese classic gave the story a new focus. Demon Queen would become the novel Spencer Baum circa ages 11 – 14 was looking for but could never find.
Preteen Spencer loved the masterpieces of young adult angst by Lois Duncan and Robert Cormier, the forbidden (in Catholic School) horror novels of Stephen King, and the fantastic yarns of Jules Verne. When I wasn’t reading in those days, I was watching movie monsters destroy Tokyo or the 1970’s classic Bug Attack! flicks.
The Demon Queen and The Locksmith is all of the above: The Chocolate War, Daughters of Eve, It, Space Giants, and Empire of the Ants thrown into a blender and poured on the page. I hope you enjoy!
